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Misc

It’s scary to think that 2014 has been and gone, and that I still haven’t released the next major version of Whiley! Despite this, I have been busy improving the compiler and language and I thought it would be helpful for me to recap what was achieved last year, and what the goals going . . . → Read More: Looking Forward to 2015

Issue #427 “Bug with Dereferencing Array Types” seemed like just another bug. Submitted by a user last week (@Matt–), I didn’t think too much of it. But, as sometimes happens, appearances can be deceiving. In this case, the bug identified a flaw in the syntax of Whiley with respect to the treatment of cast . . . → Read More: A Story of Cast Expressions

Recently, I have been reworking the Whiley compiler’s parser to make it more robust. Doing this has opened up some interesting issues, which I thought were worth discussing. Whiley uses indentation syntax without explicit end-of-statement terminators (e.g. semi-colons) and these things cause some interesting challenges.

Recently, I was having a somewhat heated discussion with a friend about the Java I/O library (specificially java.io.*). His position was that the library is unnecessarily cluttered and verbose, and that I/O in C is much simpler and more productive. Whilst I agreed with some of that, I also argued that the Java I/O . . . → Read More: Comparing I/O in C with Java

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eclipse and trying to build a plugin. On the whole, I have to confess, I find that Eclipse is an extremely well-designed and considered piece of software. The biggest problem, I suppose, is that it is designed for a wide variety of tasks and this means . . . → Read More: Are Checked Exceptions Always Caused by I/O?

We were having an interesting discussion the other day, and the issue of final classes came up. For some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that all classes should be final by default. That is, classes should be implicitly final, rather than requiring an explicit declaration. For example, the following should be considered invalid . . . → Read More: Final should be Default for Classes in Java

For the Whiley compiler, I currently have over 500 end-end tests and in excess of 15,000 unit tests (most of which were auto-generated and target the type system). Each end-end test is a short Whiley program that is categorised as either valid or invalid. Valid tests also include sample output and are expected to . . . → Read More: Not all Tests are Passing … is that so Bad?

Reverting is tough. There’s no doubt about it! I don’t mean tough as in technically challenging — no, version control systems make this easy! I mean tough as in mentally challenging. You’re faced with days or weeks of effort going down the drain, and you have to decide when to pull the plug. Sure, . . . → Read More: What Kind of Revert are You?